STASIS

It is gorgeous, oozes character and sucked me right in! The voice acting is great (I love all the talking heads! Reminds me of first two Fallouts), the art and esthetic are fabulous and the music and sound are excellent. All this combines to create a really unique atmosphere. I don't play a lot of games in this genre so don't have a lot to compare my experience to, but I am thoroughly enjoying it and exploring the world it is set in.

Interesting though somewhat confusing in places. Takes dedication as as a bit dry in the middle.

TL;DR Not good, not bad. Just 'eh'. I liked some parts of it, especially the ending, but pixel hunting and voice acting can ruin it sometimes. If you like point-and-clicks - get it on a sale. Not TL;DR Cons: - pixel hunting - janky controls - spotty voice acting - villain Pros: + premise and story + presentation You play as a guy who wakes up in a space station that's seemingly abandoned. He doesn't know how he got there or where his family is. Your job is to find your family and gtfo. There will be horror elements along the way. A lot of puzzles I had trouble with were easy once I found a necessary item on accident. Pathfinding is all over the place, because that's what where you can expect the hero to walk if you point to any point that isn't in a straight line. Using items also sometimes doesn't work first time and you have to click again. Some voice lines ruin the mood. The villain is barely explored and doesn't have enough effort behind him to warrant some of his pompous dialogue. But I liked the story and most of the visual design. The ending was also pretty ok. Not a straightforward finish, if you haven't been reading certain PDA's you will be confused. You can die in this game, but autosave usually takes you back moments before and you can't really soft-lock yourself. Death scenes are well animated. Get it on a sale if it looks interesting to you.

NO spoilers review. First off, I'm a huge fan of point and click adventures and a developer myself. I played this one with my partner and talked about it a lot. I backed this project and read everything and followed it since the beginning so I'll spend a while giving a review for the creators: What we loved : - Unique style! - Huge quality of graphics and details. Lighting. Amazing. - Sounds, atmosphere. There's an amazing work on sound effects and sensibility. - Voices were amazing. And that helps in the realism of the story. - Story is engaging. Interesting! What we disliked: - The character orientation is not aligned with the isometric grid. And the new game has the same problem again. How can be 3d so good in here and that missed completely? Is not oriented! - Animation was far from good. Please, let a professional animator help you with that! - Too much text in lots of paragraphs. I'm the kind of person who likes reading all to learn about the story, but that was WAY too much text. We ended up laughing at how much text there was. Why not separate it in pieces, give hints, or even read it. Sometimes very hard to read in that size and with those backgrounds. Honestly. Way too much... - Spanish translation had many many grammar and syntax errors. Just for your information. And some of them, serious ones. - Too many rooms (too much work!) for so little things to do. And that, for an indie game, is terrible! In terms of months of work. Yeah, they were amazing but not needed at all. The same problem we found on Syberia. Oh god, how much effort on very little things to do in them. - Thank god they added a light to find the pdas. Most of the time we were lost and had to look for a guide (which is a total failure for us) because we couldn't find the items in the place and some of them were extremely difficult to find. Maybe highlighting elements on the scene when you move beside them? - A couple of puzzles made no sense at all. But that happens to every game.

I backed this on Kickstarter and have it on Steam. But is it good? From a technical standpoint, yes and no - Stasis is sort of an ugly baby; it's going to get lots of love and its ugliness won't take away from its identity, but it's still gonna be ugly. I'm exaggerating, of course - the game features absolutely beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds with an occasional perspective problem (depth of field effects would greatly reduce this), but some elements are a bit clunky. Most importantly, pathfinding is a little off sometimes - while generally pretty good from most angles, there are odd times where you click somewhere and John, our hero, gets stuck or decides to take the most scenic route possible. Animations are a little jarring sometimes, as well. Some of the action sequences are oddly animated or off-pace. Unless the animation is baked into the background (which typically looks great - fans, creatures, etc), character models often remind me of gummi bears. Other than that, this is a roots-style game - no button to highlight hotspots, lots of adventure game logic, etc. Storywise, Stasis is interesting. At its base, you wake up from cryosleep and this isn't the ship you remember being aboard. Everything is chaotic and bloody and your family is nowhere to be found. Start clicking to unravel the mystery. My issue here is the game has a huge dependency on "finding logs" and getting the story that way. When you strip away all the substantial log entries, you realize you've only talked to two people and actually 'played' for half an hour of your hour-long session. I don't regret backing Stais; I would have played it eventually. For what it is, it does its job admirably and nothing mentioned above breaks the game. A little more time in the oven would have been nice, but in the end, it's worth playing and worth supporting these gents so they can knock one out of the park. Nobody does it their first time out, but these chaps came pretty close. Good job!